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As I write this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Barcelona, in the midst of one of the greatest vacations of my life. I’ve journeyed here with five very good friends, all of whom are some of the best and most delightful people I know. We’re here to celebrate my 40th birthday, an occasion we all more or less decided needed to be recognized somewhere far away where we could just have fun. Hence, Barcelona, a place I have never been to before but have grown to love in the past several days.

Did you know that this is National Library Week? I have to admit, I didn’t know until last week, when Carol told me about it and also about her own efforts to keep one of the libraries in her hometown open (read the whole story here). Carol’s story resonated with me, because I too was a “library kid.” My mom made weekly trips to the library and picked up books for herself and my dad, and I always tagged along and got my own. My mom was also a volunteer at my grade school’s library. Going to the library was as much a part of my childhood as going to the arcade or toy store.

The past two weeks have been a bit of a blur. They began with a lunch meeting with Rachel Renée Russell, author of Dork Diaries, and continued with a special screening of the Wimpy Kid movie (which Russell happily admits helped inspire her work). Having felt like a wimpy kid and a dork at many times in my childhood, I could relate to both sides. And my lunch with Russell was quite a bit of fun (I'll be putting the interview online soon). We met at New York’s famous Dean and Deluca outside of the "Today Show" studios and proceeded to talk about everything under the sun (both of us being native Midwesterners transplanted to the East Coast, we had a lot of things to talk about). I wrote a review of the Wimpy Kid movie and blogged about it, so you can check that out to see what I thought (the short version: I loved it, much more than I had expected to). Carol saw it this week and admits to laughing out loud, and, as she had read the books in advance, she felt it was a very strong adaptation.